Human Rights. Michael Freeman

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Human Rights - Michael  Freeman


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good. Kantian arguments could support the right of the poor to subsistence, even if Kant did not (Ripstein 2009).

      Kant developed a concept of ‘cosmopolitan right’, by which individuals could be citizens of a universal state of mankind. It specified a ‘right to hospitality’ – the right not to be treated with hostility in a foreign country – but no modern human rights. Kant opposed the idea of a world-state on the ground that it would become tyrannical; a universal federation of sovereign republics was the ideal for international relations. Rights depended on states, and thus states had the right to non-interference. Kant’s philosophy could support a non-coercive, international human-rights regime. Kant also held that international peace was necessary to ensure the state protection of rights (Maliks 2014; Sangiovanni 2015).

      There are conflicting interpretations of Kant, and different views of his relation to human rights. Kant’s paradox is that he provided deep and strong arguments that can be used to justify human rights, but, if we seek such justifications in the historical Kant, we may be disappointed.

      Paine argued that historic rights were indefensible because no moment in history had priority over others as the basis of rights. Equal rights were necessary to motivate everyone to fulfil their duties to others. A system of rights was necessarily also a system of duties, for, if we all have rights, we all have duties to respect the rights of others. Notwithstanding his belief that the origin of human rights was the divine creation of human beings, Paine’s theory of the Rights of Man was grounded in reason, which could support a secular conception of human rights (Paine [1791] 1988).

      Paine saw civil society as naturally co-operative and progressive, and the need for governmental regulation as limited. By contrast, the essence of the state was coercion. As civil society grew more complex and stronger, it both needed protection from the state and had the ability to secure it. Paine thought that the pursuit of self-interest was legitimate in civil society, but that it ought to be subordinated to the common good. Like Locke, he accepted inequalities of wealth as legitimate if they were products of differential rationality and industry, but he was more concerned with the misery of poverty than Locke had been. He proposed a system of public welfare financed by progressive taxation. Paine anticipated the social-democratic argument that public guarantees of minimal welfare, far from violating the natural rights of anyone, sustain the rights of all (Philp 1989).

      Edmund Burke did not reject the concept of natural rights completely. He recognized the natural rights to life, liberty, freedom of conscience, the fruits of one’s labour, property, and equal justice under the law. Nevertheless, he considered the concept generally to be, at best, a useless metaphysical abstraction, and, at worst, subversive of social order. Thus, the ‘real rights of men’ were social not natural rights. Burke distrusted all abstract theoretical ideas in the making of public policy, as he believed politics to be essentially a practical activity that involved the making of judgements in complex circumstances. The French revolutionary doctrine of the Rights of Man was dangerous because it was simplistic and dogmatic.

      Although Burke subscribed to natural-law theory, he opposed the universalism of the natural-rights concept for its failure to take account of national and cultural diversity. This cultural relativism offered little to those who had to endure tyranny. Significantly, Burke appealed to the concept of natural rights when analysing what he regarded as intolerable tyrannies, such as Protestant rule in Ireland (Freeman 1980).

      In the nineteenth century Utilitarianism superseded the concept of natural rights as the theoretical basis of reform in both England and France. As the Revolution progressed, there was support in France for the view that the concept of natural rights was anarchic. A group of philosophers known as the Idéologues sought to set aside the concept of the Rights


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